Maroon Nation: 21st Century Haitian Lit & Culture

A new history of post‑Revolutionary Haiti, and the society that emerged in the aftermath of the world's most successful slave revolution   Haiti is widely recognized as the only state born out of a successful slave revolt, but the country's early history remains scarcely understood. In this deeply researched and original volume, Johnhenry Gonzalez weaves a history of early independent Haiti focused on crop production, land reform, and the unauthorized rural settlements devised by former slaves of the colonial plantation system.

Beverly Bell, an activist and award-winning writer, has dedicated her life to working for democracy, women's rights, and economic justice in Haiti and elsewhere. Since the 7.0 magnitude earthquake of January 12, 2010, that struck the island nation, killing more than a quarter-million people and leaving another two million Haitians homeless, Bell has spent much of her time in Haiti. Her new book, Fault Lines, is a searing account of the first year after the earthquake. Bell explores how strong communities and an age-old gift culture have helped Haitians survive in the wake of an unimaginable disaster, one that only compounded the preexisting social and economic distress of their society. The book examines the history that caused such astronomical destruction. It also draws in theories of resistance and social movements to scrutinize grassroots organizing for a more just and equitable country. Fault Lines offers rich perspectives rarely seen outside Haiti.

The Haitian Revolution was perhaps the most successful slave rebellion in modern history; it created the first and only free and independent Black nation in the Americas. This book tells the story of how enslaved Africans forcibly brought to colonial Haiti through the trans-Atlantic slave trade used their cultural and religious heritages, social networks, and labor and militaristic skills to survive horrific conditions. They built webs of networks between African and 'creole' runaways, slaves, and a small number of free people of color through rituals and marronnage - key aspects to building the racial solidarity that helped make the revolution successful.

For more than four centuries, communities of maroons (men and women who escaped slavery) dotted the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States. Today their descendants still form semi-independent enclaves-in Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia, Belize, Suriname, Guyane, and elsewhere-remaining proud of their maroon origins and, in some cases, faithful to unique cultural traditions forged during the earliest days of Afro-American history.

To a contemporary audience, Haiti brings to mind Voodoo spells, Tontons Macoutes, and boat people--nothing worth fighting over. Two centuries ago, however, Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, was the "Pearl of the Antilles," France's most valuable overseas colony, the largest exporter of tropical products in the world, and the United States' second most important trading partner after England.   Haiti was also the place where in 1801-1802 Napoléon Bonaparte sent the largest colonial venture of his reign: the Leclerc expedition. His goal was to remove the famous revolutionary Toussaint Louverture from office and, possibly, restore slavery. But within two years, the remnants of Bonaparte's once-proud army were evacuated in defeated, and Haiti declared its independence.

While Haiti established the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere and was the first black country to gain independence from European colonizers, its history is not well known in the Anglophone world. The Haiti Reader introduces readers to Haiti's dynamic history and culture from the viewpoint of Haitians from all walks of life. Its dozens of selections--most of which appear here in English for the first time--are representative of Haiti's scholarly, literary, religious, visual, musical, and political cultures, and range from poems, novels, and political tracts to essays, legislation, songs, and folk tales. Spanning the centuries between precontact indigenous Haiti and the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, the Reader covers widely known episodes in Haiti's history, such as the U.S. military occupation and the Duvalier dictatorship, as well as overlooked periods such as the decades immediately following Haiti's "second independence" in 1934.

Winner of the 2021 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize​ Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte is the first US scholarly examination of the politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who fought against the US military occupation of Haiti. The occupation lasted close to two decades, from 1915-1934. Alexis argues for the importance of documenting resistance while exploring the occupation's mechanics and its imperialism. She takes us to Haiti, exploring the sites of what she labels as resistance zones, including Péralte's hometown of Hinche and the nation's large port areas--Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien. Alexis offers a new reading of U.S. military archival sources that record Haitian protests as banditry. Haiti Fights Back illuminates how Péralte launched a political movement, and meticulously captures how Haitian women and men resisted occupation through silence, military battles, and writings. She locates and assembles rare, multilingual primary sources from traditional repositories, living archives (oral stories), and artistic representations in Haiti and the United States. The interdisciplinary work draws on legislation, cacos' letters, newspapers, and murals, offering a unique examination of Péralte's life (1885-1919) and the significance of his legacy through the twenty-first century. Haiti Fights Back offers a new approach to the study of the U.S. invasion of the Americas by chronicling how Caribbean people fought back.  

I Am Alive (Je suis vivant) is celebrated Haitian author Kettly Mars's latest novel, telling the story of a bourgeois Caribbean family as it wrestles with issues of mental illness, unconventional sexuality, and the difficulty of returning home and rediscovery following the devastating 2010 earthquake. Mars, herself a survivor of the disaster, has crafted a complex, at times disorienting, but ultimately enthralling and powerfully evocative work of literature that adds to her reputation as one of the leading voices of the francophone world. When the mental health facility where he has been living for decades is severely damaged, Alexandre Bernier must return home to Fleur-de-Chêne. His sister Marylène has also come home, leaving behind a flourishing career as a painter in Brussels, and begins to explore her sexuality with her artist's model Norah, who poses for her in secret. These homecomings are both a lift and a burden to the family matriarch, Éliane, a steadfast and resourceful widow. Over the course of the novel, past and present blend together as each character has an opportunity to narrate the story from their own perspective. In the end, it is the resilience of the Haitian people that allows them to navigate the seismic shifts in their family and in the land.

The Immortals is set in an infamous neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, on Grand-Rue, where many women, young and old, trade in flesh, sex, and desire. We learn, in glimpses and fragments, about the lives of women who fall in love with the moving images of television, the romance of a novel, and the dreams of escape. This moving novel asks, What becomes of these women, their lives, their stories, their desires, and their whims when a violent earthquake brings the capital city and its brothels to their knees? To preserve the memory of women she lived and worked with, the anonymous narrator makes a deal with her client once she discovers that he is a writer: sex in exchange for recording the stories of the friends who were buried beneath the rubble. She tells the stories of women who were friends, lovers, daughters, and mothers--all while their profession sought to hide any trace of intimacy or interiority through pseudonyms and artifice. Ultimately the book reveals how a group of women sought to make a name for themselves in life, demanding that they not be forgotten in death. Winner of France's 2012 Prix Thyde Monnier de la Société des Gens de Lettres, The Immortals is the first work of fiction by the celebrated Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel. Mingling poetry and prose, Orcel centers stories that too often go untold, while reflecting on the power and limits of storytelling in the face of catastrophe.

Lisette, a Saint-Domingue-born Creole slave and daughter of an African-born bossale, has inherited not only the condition of slavery but the traumatic memory of the Middle Passage as well. The stories told to her by her grandmother and godmother, including the horrific voyage aboard the infamous slave ship Rosalie, have become part of her own story, the one she tells in this haunting novel by the acclaimed Haitian writer Évelyne Trouillot. Inspired by the colonial tale of an African midwife who kept a cord of some seventy knots, each one marking a child she had killed at birth, the novel transports us back to Saint-Domingue, before it became Haiti. The year is 1750, and a rash of poisonings is sowing fear among the plantation masters, already unsettled by the unrest caused by Makandal, the legendary Maroon leader. Through this tumultuous time, Lisette struggles to maintain her dignity and to imagine a future for her unborn child. In telling Lisette’s story, Trouillot gives the revolution that will soon rock the island a human face and at long last sheds light on the invisible women and men of Haitian history. The original French edition of Rosalie l’infâme received the Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone, honoring a novel written by a woman from a French-speaking country which showcases the cultural and literary diversity of the French-speaking world.

In this energetic celebration of Haiti and its capital in the early 2000s, Trouillot embodies the nation's indomitable spirit in the voice of his narrator. This anonymous, world-weary, 20-something male student keenly depicts a country entering a new era after years of dictatorship, oppression, corruption, and the chaos wrought by the most recent foreign arrivals: the international peace-keeping forces sent to restore order after the departure of the U.S. Marines, known as "the Big Boots." In a series of journal entries, the young protagonist introduces readers to his world within a world--a community center in Port-au-Prince peopled by a motley group of friends, lovers, revolutionaries, compatriots, dreamers, schemers, and mentors, all living under the watchful eye of Man Jeanne, the proprietress. Readers meet the "gang of five," among whom are two beautiful young women who work at the local bar, Kannjawou, and the men who pursue them; the wise older veterans scarred by the torture of past regimes; the nonchalant tourists and foreign officials who populate the bar; and the gentle mentor, rival in love, and father figure to the group, known lovingly to all as "the little professor." In KANNJAWOU Trouillot has penned a love song and a swan song to that era of dispersion for Haiti's people, who, even when they are far from home carry with them the kannjawou spirit.

The award-winning saga of a peasant family living in a small Haitian village, told through four generations of voices, recounting through stories of tradition and superstition, voodoo and the new gods, romance and violence, the lives of the women who struggled to hold the family together in an ever-shifting landscape of political turmoil and economic suffering.

This book explores the social, political, and historical forces that mediate language ideology and practices in post-colonial education and how such ideology and practices influence students' academic achievement. Jean-Pierre provides empirical evidence that a relationship exists between language practices and school underperformance. He takes Haiti as the focus of study, finding that students and teachers experience difficulty constructing knowledge in a setting in which the language they speak at home (Creole) differs from the language of instruction (French). The research is based on ethnographic data collected in classrooms in both private and public school settings in addition to different sectors of the society (e.g. state and private institutions).

Approaching Haiti'shistory and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective This volume is the first to focus on teaching about Haiti's complex history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective. Making broad connections between Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean, contributors provide pedagogical guidance on how to approach the country from different lenses in course curricula. They offer practical suggestions, theories on a wide variety of texts, examples of syllabi, and classroom experiences. Teaching Haiti dispels stereotypes associating Haiti with disaster, poverty, and negative ideas of Vodou, going beyond the simplistic neocolonial, imperialist, and racist descriptions often found in literary and historical accounts. Instructors in diverse subject areas discuss ways of reshaping old narratives through women's and gender studies, poetry, theater, art, religion, language, politics, history, and popular culture, and they advocate for including Haiti in American and Latin American studies courses. Portraying Haiti not as "the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere" but as a nation with a multifaceted culture that plays an important part on the world's stage, this volume offers valuable lessons about Haiti's past and present related to immigration, migration, locality, and globality. The essays remind us that these themes are increasingly relevant in an era in which teachers are often called to address neoliberalist views and practices and isolationist politics. Contributors: Cécile Accilien | Jessica Adams |Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken | Anne M. François | Régine Michelle Jean-Charles | Elizabeth Langley | Valérie K. Orlando | Agnès Peysson-Zeiss | John D. Ribó | Joubert Satyre | Darren Staloff |Bonnie Thomas | Don E. Walicek | Sophie Watt